About a dozen years ago, during winter, I read my first spy novel. I was at an antique store with a friend, and as I was preparing to check out, I spotted an old, but finely preserved hardback copy of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” by John le Carré resting near the counter. I thought I'd heard the title’s name before, but could not honestly place it. Nonetheless, I picked it up, paid my $7, and hoped for a good read. It was the beginning of my love affair with espionage fiction, and the works of le Carré remains mon grand amour.
Le Carré died in December 2020, less than a year before his 90th birthday. There are many fine living spy novelists, but there was something different about the work of le Carré. His stories, perhaps not always short and concise, possessed rough but direct prose. He had a gift for satisfactory endings, not because they were storybook, but because they were brutally realistic.
By the same token, woven throughout his stories were threads of poetry describing the characters and places in ways that identified the true nature of, say, Cold War spies, spymasters, victims, and their surroundings. For me at least, it was the perfect mode of storytelling for a world both fantastically alluring and utterly frightening. With le Carré gone, that world, as he presented it, appeared to have ended. But something rather miraculous has taken place—miraculous in several ways.
Picking up His Father’s Pen
Nick Harkaway, the son of David Cornwell (aka John le Carré), picked up his father’s pen. In his new book, “Karla’s Choice,” Harkaway chose as the centerpiece of his story le Carré most famous and beloved protagonist, George Smiley. As Harkaway readily admits in his opening “Author’s Note,” the decision came with apprehensions. To lift a spirit from the grave is no simple task. It does take a miracle. But upon completing the novel, I was struck that the unfathomable had been accomplished: The son had resurrected the father.The first hint that Harkaway was on the right track by taking on such a task was in his “Author’s Note.” It was his self-deprecation. It was his overt honesty toward the reader that reflected not le Carré’s fiction, but his nonfiction. Le Carré’s memoir, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” is riddled with this self-deprecating straightforwardness and sly humor.
Espionage as Chess
“Karla’s Choice” is set sometime in the 1960s, between two of le Carré’s most famous works, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Readers are brought back into the dank and gray world of the Circus (le Carré’s name for British intelligence), the demands of Control (the intelligence boss), and George Smiley, whose resignation, after the tragedy of Alec Leamas (“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”), has been rescinded for a mission only he can accomplish.
Of course, this isn’t a typical one-last-mission type of spy novel that’s contingent upon machine guns and fast cars. No, this—and this is what makes le Carré’s (and now Harkaway’s) work so special—is a thinking man’s game. It’s slow, methodical, and thoughtful suspense. It is as espionage should be: a game of chess.
Le Carré wasn’t lazy with his readers. It never felt like an action had to take place and then he supplemented a reason for that action later on. No, the puzzle pieces always fit. Harkaway has carved his own story with pieces that fit seamlessly. His characters, even when making decisions in haste or in error, aren’t irrational. The young and beautiful Hungarian, Susanna Gero, makes a rash decision, but does so with a very believable and convincing argument. Certainly, readers will consider the decision, when it’s made, to be an unwise one, but it’s one they will hardly fault her for.
Reminiscent of Le Carré
All of this is reminiscent of the master spy novelist. But that’s just the structure and method. The writing—that poetic prose—was the most surprising part of all. It was a return to brutal honesty that seduces with its elegance, such as this singular example when he describes Berlin (East and West at the time): “The Wall a gash down the centre of its face. … Streets were broken in the middle by a no man’s land of barbed wire and searchlights; schools were cut off from their playgrounds and warehouses from markets.” It ends with “The map of the war was burned forever on to what should have been reconstruction, and the city existed in a frozen parody of peace.”Harkaway has revived the world of George Smiley, establishing a chronological piece in the Smiley narrative that reads rather like an old le Carré novel that accidentally went unpublished, not a work by a different author. The old characters—Smiley, Control, Ann Smiley, Bill Haydon, and Toby Esterhase—maintain their personalities; the Cold War era setting maintains its familiar drab and oppressive feel; and, in le Carré fashion, the book maintains its methodical, chess-like style.
“Karla’s Choice” is what you want in a spy novel: suspenseful, smart, and satisfying. For le Carré fans, it’s all that wrapped in nostalgia.
Harkaway seemed to hint in his acknowledgements that he will continue the “le Carré” novels, which promises the nostalgia will live on. I’m certain it will be some time, perhaps years, before Harkaway’s next le Carré novel is written and published, but considering those novels seemed to have ended with the author’s death, I’m more than willing to be patient. Le Carré was one of my favorite novelists, and with practically a literary embodiment by his son, I guess he still is.
